David Briggs has published four collections with Salt Publishing. The Method Men (2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize, and Rain Rider (2013) was a winter selection of the Poetry Book Society. His third book, Cracked Skull Cinema (2019), was a Poetry Wales pick of the year. David received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and since then his work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies from The Poetry Review to the generational anthology edited by Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010). A teacher of English in Bristol since 2005, David founded and currently chairs the Writers' Examination Board, which offers the Apprentice of Fine Arts (AFA) in Creative Writing - a post-16 qualification that is currently live in twelve UK schools. David has been poet-in-residence at Bristol University, and from 2019-2023 he was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme. In 2023 he completed his practice-based PhD research, The Odyssey Complex: Reading and Writing Midlife Poetics and Middle Style at the University of Exeter.
About The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems
David’s fourth collection, The Odyssey Complex and Other Stories (Salt, 2024), offers a midlife counterpart to the poetics of both youth and late style, exploring themes of family ties, nostalgia and retreat, ageing and mortality, acts of memorial and the impulse towards hospitality.
You can read more about The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.
From The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems, by David Briggs
Cointreau
in memoriam Avril Henry
I love its boozy citrus hit,
how in licking my lips post-sip
it sharpens that extra-temporal bit
of self that’s able to taste
the past in the present,
taste two moments co-eval
in its sweetness.
And it puts me in mind of Avril
placing a bottle of Harpic, and Marigolds,
on the shelf to the side of her bathtub –
ever considerate of others,
of those who might find her
many days after –
and climbing in carefully
in her best purple kaftan;
diluting the poison
in a brandy-glass measure
of blood-orange Cointreau
to smother its foulness.
And I like to imagine
that she had a book,
perhaps her translation
of Guillaume de Deguileville’s
Pilgrimage of the Life of the Manhode,
from which I also imagine her
reading aloud while Death inched closer,
put one cold hand on her heart.
There’s just enough of the past
swilling around in the present,
like just enough barbiturate
in a terminal glass of Cointreau;
like there’s just enough barbiturate
for the task, in a vial
she’d hidden so presciently
beneath floorboards,
fearful of interventions,
of untimely police raids,
of cold-calling journalists.
She taught me so much I’m grateful to know.
Each year, on this day,
I pour for myself
a chilled, double rocks glass
of Cointreau.
Living with the Douglasses
Michael Douglas is renting our spare room
again. It’s just temporary, till work picks up
and/or Catherine takes him back.
He’s an early riser, and on bright mornings
we’ll find him out in the garden with
black coffee and a Thai stick, looking
so much like Sandy Kominsky/Grady Tripp
we wonder how much acting was involved
in these recent projects. But it’s still work I rate –
notwithstanding the acclaimed roles he played
in the 80s and 90s – since it feels
as though he’s comfortable enough now
in his accomplishments to take himself
a little less seriously; as though he no longer needs
some Nietzschean hero narrative to flatter
an entitled sense of celebrity and is enjoying
the opportunity to play gently botched characters
with the (often unfulfilled) potential for redemption.
As though he’s embraced his inner clown.
Sometimes, I wonder if it really is Michael Douglas
who’s living with us, and my wife’ll say, “Well,
if he’s not Michael Douglas then who the hell is he?”
And I’ll laugh and say: “You’re right. I’m ridiculous.
Of course he’s Michael Douglas,” before knocking
to see if he wants a cup of joe. I like the way
he’s arranged his flamboyant neck scarves
on his tailor’s dummy and, sometimes, I think
Should I grow my hair out like Michael Douglas?
Whenever I encounter a crisis of self-doubt,
I’ll give myself a pep talk, saying things like
“Michael Douglas may be going through
a tough patch right now, but he’s got chutzpah
and is a pretty good style model for the older man.”
But then I’ll recall that much of his swagger,
the élan that enables him to carry off that look,
comes from years of Hollywood stardom
and a foot-locker of great anecdotes featuring
some of the world’s most glamorous people.
And I’ll realise with a sigh that my three books
with a small press and that time I shared the bill
with Don Paterson don’t really compare,
that I’m probably kidding myself.
But then I say: “Fuck it. I’m Spartacus!” And laugh.
And my wife says, “That was Kirk Douglas, knucklehead.”
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